Pokemon GO Removed Tracking Features and Fans Are PISSED

All is not well in the world of Pokemon GO - while its rise was fast and momentous, its fall is coming just as quickly and explosively. Where to start? Well, it's been a well-known bug for a long time that the step tracker (which hinted as nearby Pokemon using footprints) was busted, with the steps essentially meaning nothing - and it's long been expected that Niantic (the developers behind Pokemon GO) would be working to release a fix ASAP, given the game was the most popular phone game ever released and was delivering piles of money to Niantic HQ every day and they would be completely crazy to not just fix the simplest and most egregious glitch in their game.

Well, we just saw the release of Pokemon GO's 0.31.0 update, which saw Niantic address the footprint issue by...REMOVING THEM ALTOGETHER?

But that alone might not be TOO disastrous (even though the nearby footsteps function is just a random list of Pokemon that could be anywhere in any direction around you now), since Pokemon GO tracker sites like PokeVision and PokeDetect were still around to give you details on where you can go to find specific Pokemon, right?

Wrong - those sites (and others like them) were taken offline at the meddling of Niantic and Nintendo, who didn't want players who played their game to have fun for some reason? One of the devs of PokeVision summed up the situation like this:

So, in short, Niantic has responded to their uber-popular game by:

removing one of the game's key features instead of fixing it

taken down sites that do their job for them

Fans of the game are NOT happy (duh) - some are desperately trying to get refunds for in-app purchases and are essentially abandoning the game altogether, some are leaving unhappy reviews on the App Store and Google Play Store, and everyone is voicing their displeasure via memes: